“Give us his body; we want to give him a respectable burial…” this is the overwhelming demand across Kashmir following the hanging of Mohammad Afzal Guru who was convicted for his role in the attack on the Indian parliament on Dec. 13.  2001. Nine people died in the attack.

Guru was convicted by a trial court in 2002. Two years later, the Indian Supreme Court upheld the trial court’s order.

A mercy petition from his family was rejected by President Pranab Mukherjee on Feb. 3. He was executed on Feb. 9 in New Delhi’s Tihar Jail. The body was buried in the jail premises.

His family and many others have objected strongly to the burial. “We will not sit silent until the body of our beloved brother is returned to us,” Afzal’s elder brother Aijaz Guru told IPS in a broken voice over phone from his house in Doabgah-Sopore, 65 km north of Kashmir state capital Srinagar. “We want to give him a decent burial.”

He added: “We are well aware that our brother became a victim of vote bank politics. Now his body should be returned to us. It is our right.”

The demand for Guru’s body is the second such from Kashmiris. There is already a demand for return of the mortal remains of Maqbool Bhat, a Kashmiri separatist leader who was hanged and buried in Tihar Jail on Feb. 11, 1984 after being convicted on the charge of killing an Indian official. Kashmiris have kept an empty grave for Bhat’s mortal remains in Srinagar’s ‘Martyrs’ Graveyard’.

The execution of Afzal Guru has evoked strong reactions from civil society and political parties in Kashmir across the board. With elections in India due next year, many say Guru was hanged for ‘petty’ political reasons and that he was not given fair trial.

“This is part of India’s election drama and a proposition motivated by electoral considerations in which Kashmiris are being made sacrificial lambs,” separatist leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq told IPS over phone from New Delhi where he was detained briefly after the hanging of Guru.

“Yes, there was politics involved at every stage and it was indeed a political trial rather than a judicial trial,” Prof. Anuradha Chenoy from the School of International Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in New Delhi told IPS on phone.

According to Chenoy, there are many loopholes in the Indian judicial system. “The Indian lower courts and judiciary as a whole look at some cases in a typical fashion: if they treat somebody as an enemy, they look at his case with that perspective only; and not on merit,” she said. “It is well known that Guru did not get a fair trial.”

Expressing her distress about Afzal’s last wish to see his family not being fulfilled, she said:  “Every person’s last wish before death is to see his family. But it is quite unfortunate that he did not get an opportunity to see his wife and son before he was hanged.”

Guru’s friends say he had “given up militancy” in the late 1990s and had set up a pharmaceuticals business.

Delhi University lecturer Syed Abdul Rehman Geelani, who was earlier acquitted in the same case, said that Afzal Guru’s family was not informed by the government about his execution. “His wife had absolutely no clue. Under the law, she had every right to meet him before the execution,” he told IPS.

“I woke her up early on that morning (Feb. 9) and informed her about rumours of Afzal’s hanging. It was so shocking for her as she was completely unaware. She told me that she had received no communication at all.”

India’s Home Secretary R. K. Singh has said the family was sent a letter through speed post.

That led Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah to say: “If we are going to inform someone by post that his family member is going to be hanged, there is something seriously wrong with the system.”

Omar Abdullah said this kind of execution is “unheard of.”  In an interview to Indian news channel NDTV, he said:  “There are enough voices already in the rest of the country who believe that the evidence was flawed.”

According to Abdullah, there could be long-term political implications. “We can deal with the short-term implications as we have taken enough security measures for that, but what we are worried about are the long-term political implications of this execution,” he said.

Mehbooba Mufti, president of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) – the largest opposition party in the legislative assembly – said that while “the hanging should not have been carried out, the return of Afzal’s body was the least the government could do to show concern for humanity.”

The Kashmir government has imposed curfew all over the state. At least three people have been killed and scores injured in clashes between police and people who defied curfew restrictions.

Internet services have been blocked in order to curb protests on social media. News channels have also been blocked.

Wednesday, Nov. 21, dawned like any other in the sleepy town of Faridkot, located some 150 kilometres from the Punjab capital of Lahore in Pakistan. But as the town’s 3000 residents went about their daily routines the air grew thick with apprehension, for a reason none wanted to mention.

At seventy-thirty that morning, one of the town’s former residents, a man named Ajmal Kasab, was executed in Pune’s Yerawada Central Jail, in western India’s Maharashtra state.

Kasab was the sole survivor of a group of ten men who carried out the three-day terror rampage in November 2008 that left 166 people dead in Mumbai.

Kasab was charged with 86 offences, including murder and waging war against the Indian state. After a long trial and the denial of his clemency appeal on Nov. 5, he was hanged just a few days before the fourth anniversary of the senseless but well-orchestrated attack that brought the nuclear neighbours to the brink of war.

Shafique Butt, a correspondent for the English daily newspaper ‘Dawn’, who visited the village on the morning of the execution, told IPS over the phone from Punjab, “While everyone knew he had been hanged, people were just not willing to talk about it; let alone express their feelings – either in favour or against (the execution).”

Kasab’s immediate family had long since left the village. “No one is sure if they have been relocated by the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), or Pakistan’s intelligence agencies,” said Butt. The LeT is also blamed for an attack on the Indian parliament in 2001.

“I was told there are five or six Lashkar men in the village,” Butt added, including, possibly, Kasab’s younger brother who was just a teenager in 2008.

On the streets, ordinary Pakistanis have shown little or no interest in Kasab’s hanging. They are far too concerned about their own safety: bomb blasts have become a daily occurrence in all the big cities, despite high security since the holy month of Muharram began a week ago.

“The government of Pakistan will not take a critical position on this issue; it will stay quiet,” said Hasan Askari Rizvi, a Lahore-based political analyst.

Islamic parties and hard-line anti-India groups have expressed some resentment or spoken about the denial of justice, Askari told IPS, but sustained protest was not expected.

Only a handful of people, like Saba Khan, a housemaid in Faridkot, lamented the act. “Couldn’t they have given him life imprisonment? They didn’t even grant him his last wish of meeting his mother,” she told IPS.

Re-examining ‘terrorism’ in Pakistan

On the other side of the border, the hanging has been hailed as “a victory for India” and a “tribute to all the innocent people and police officers who lost their lives” in the tragedy of November 2008.

Megha Prasad, deputy bureau chief for the Indian news channel ‘Times Now’, who reported live from outside the Oberoi and Trident hotels where 33 people were killed, expressed surprise at the clandestine execution of “foot soldier Kasab”, but told IPS that the execution may bring “temporary closure to the victims of 26/11”.

Still, she echoed the sentiments of many when she added that justice will only be delivered when the “perpetrators and those who masterminded 26/11 are brought to book.”

Other experts have been even less taken aback by the incident, which came just one day after India, along with 39 other U.N. member states, voted against a General Assembly draft resolution calling for a non-binding moratorium on executions.

“Kasab’s hanging was a foregone conclusion and surprised no one,” Pervez Hoodbhoy, a peace activist and academic, told IPS. “It had to be done, else mass murder would have gone unpunished.”

“That the Mumbai attacks were carried out by a Pakistan-based militant group can surprise no one because, literally for decades, groups such as LeT and Jaish-e-Muhammad, have publically declared that they exist only to attack India, anywhere and at any time,” he added.

Indeed, Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, founder of the banned LeT, is a prominent public figure in Pakistan, often seen at political rallies delivering vitriolic sermons, directed primarily at the United States government.

Hoodbhoy’s analysis, shared by many others, highlights the sticky situation the government is now in.

For years, according to Askari, the most popular narrative within official political circles has been that Pakistan is a victim of terrorism. “(Most) officials attribute terrorist activities and violence in Pakistan to Pakistan’s foreign adversaries. That means that they do not give much credence to domestic sources of Pakistan’s problems.”

Zohra Yusuf, chairperson of the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, told IPS that this makes a strong case “for Pakistan to adopt a credible, meaningful policy. Pakistan has to go after terrorists – and not back off only because India is asking it to act. Almost all terrorist attacks anywhere in the world seem to have some Pakistani ‘connection’, from the U.S. embassy bombing in Kenya” to the Sep. 11, 2001 attacks on the U.S. twin towers, she said.

“The world understands how difficult it is to tackle militants,” added Ashaar Rehman, resident editor for ‘Dawn’ in Lahore, “but is in no mood to play the understanding elder when its own existence is on line.”

But for now, he said, Pakistan seems either unable or unwilling to tackle rising militancy.

Hoodbhoy pointed out that most militant groups had, at some point in their existence, received the support of Pakistani intelligence agencies. “While some still do (accept the support), others have pointed their guns against their former benefactors,” he said.

Many experts believe Pakistan should make public some of the answers they must already have gathered through their investigations such as: who masterminded the the 2008 attacks and why, where and how the gunmen were trained, and most importantly, how these activities went ‘unnoticed’ in Pakistan.

But the government has proven it will be slow to act. It took a long time for Pakistan to even admit that the Mumbai attacks were planned on its soil, and it continues to deny any official involvement.

While seven of the alleged masterminds were charged in 2009, more evidence is needed to convict them, the government insists.

(END)

Ten years of campaigning by the World Coalition against the Death Penalty have brought fruit: the number of countries that have abolished capital punishment in law or practice has gone up to 140. But some countries have resumed executions this year.

“Today, 140 countries have abolished the death penalty in law or practice. They are either completely abolitionist or have not carried out any execution for at least ten years as an official policy, not a random phenomenon. This makes up 70 percent of the world states,” Jan Erik Wetzel, Amnesty International advocate for the death penalty, told IPS in an interview.

“In 2003, only 80 countries were completely abolitionist. Ten years later, their number has risen to 97. We have abolition or a dramatic decrease of the executions in all regions and legal systems of the world. Asia and the Arab region are more difficult than others, but the death penalty is surmountable everywhere.”

According to Amnesty International, 14 countries still retain the death penalty in Asia. But 17, including Cambodia, Nepal, Bhutan, the Philippines and East Timor, have abolished it for all crimes. China, that executes most people by far in the world, has abolished the death penalty for 13 mostly economic crimes.

In the Middle East and North Africa, four out of 19 countries – Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Yemen – accounted for 99 percent of all executions last year, with a dramatic increase in Iraq (mainly for “terrorist” crimes) and Saudi Arabia (particularly for drug offenders). An increase was noted also in the Hamas controlled part of the Gaza strip. But Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Turkey, Albania, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco and Djibouti have either abolished or reduced executions dramatically. In Lebanon and Jordan the number of the death sentences has gone down, even though to a lesser extent.

“In Tunisia and Egypt, after the Arab spring, we have made sure that the death penalty becomes a part of the discussion,” Wetzel said. “In Tunisia, we suggested to abolish it and discussions are still ongoing, but the signs are not good. For these countries, we had high hopes after the uprisings, but they have not materialised.”

However, he finds it encouraging that Tunisia has not executed for more than a decade, and that President Moncef Marzouki commuted 122 death sentences in January this year. And that in Egypt former president Hosni Mubarak was sentenced to life imprisonment. “The death penalty has become part of the political conversation, when nobody talked about it before. There are very committed activists in both countries. Since the uprisings, they do a lot of grassroots work that may not bring success immediately.”

“In Egypt, for the first time people can shape the agenda,” Amr Issam of the Mission of Egypt to the UN told IPS. It would be difficult for the new government to go against the majority of the population, he said. “The key challenge is to have a constructive dialogue to encourage states to revisit the list of crimes that are punishable by death. And to bring in more safeguards and a more independent judicial process.”

States that retain the death penalty must limit it to the most serious crimes, which has been interpreted to mean the crime of murder, Kyung-Wha Kang, deputy UN high commissioner for human rights, reminded a conference to celebrate ten years of a campaign against the death penalty at the United Nations office in Geneva this week. Use of the death penalty for drug smuggling should be abolished, he said.

“In the early 1990s, we started cooperation between civil society and the Italian government for a moratorium,” said Emma Bonino, vice-president of the Italian Senate and a pioneer in the fight against capital punishment. “Many human rights groups were against the moratorium, they wanted to go for abolition. It has been a tough discussion. But today people recognise that having gone for a moratorium was a success. All the countries that have arrived to abolition have first gone through it.”

According to Amnesty International, each year, in addition to an unknown number of people executed in China, many countries including Iran, the U.S., Yemen and North Korea each carry out scores of executions. And there are backlashes: this year, Botswana, the Gambia and Japan resumed executions. Gambia had not carried out executions for the past 30 years.

A collateral and completely neglected effect of capital punishment is its impact on the orphans left behind. “There is very little research on this issue,” Helen Kearney, from the Quakers UN Office in Geneva, told IPS. “But evidence highlights serious emotional implications for these children, such as post-traumatic stress diseases and a huge social stigma.”

She deplores the lack of data collection, even in the United States, where no special programme exists to take care of the children. In some countries, especially the ones where the death penalty is routinely applied in cases of domestic violence and the children may lose both parents, they end up on the street. “We want a reframing of this question. It is a child rights and a public health issue, it is intergenerational and it reaches out to the wider community. States must take their responsibility.”